Current Events > Mary Beard abused on Twitter over Roman Britain's ethnic diversity

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/06/mary-beard-twitter-abuse-roman-britain-ethnic-diversity?

Mary Beard has said she faced a “torrent of aggressive insults” on social media after posting messages asserting the ethnic diversity of Roman Britain.

The historian had been defending a BBC schools video that featured a high-ranking black Roman soldier as the father of a family, prompting a wave of online abuse. One person said she was “literally rewriting history”.

[...]

The abuse got worse, she wrote, when Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk analysis in the US and author of the best-selling book The Black Swan, joined her critics.

Beard told Taleb on Twitter that this kind of family in Roman Britain was unsurprising. He questioned her scholarship and accused her of “talking bullshit”.

[...]

The BBC video that triggered the storm could have been based on Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a Berber from what is now Algeria who became governor of Roman Britain, Beard said. The online commentators wanted a certainty that may not be possible, but there was evidence of diversity, she wrote.

“One thing is for sure, the Roman empire, Britain included, was culturally and ethnically diverse, from the Syrians in Bath to Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the Ethiopian who met Septimius Severus on Hadrian’s Wall, and the wonderful couple from South Shields, Barates and Queenie [Regina], he from Palmyra, she an Essex girl. There is no doubt about that,” Beard said.

Explaining that it can be difficult to be sure of ethnicity because Africans took on Roman names, she said: “Even in the case of Septimius Severus, the first Roman emperor from Africa [Libya], we don’t actually know the colour of his skin, how far he was ‘native’, how far the descendent of Italian settler. The same goes for Quintus Lollius Urbicus, often claimed to be Berber, which he may well have been, but it isn’t certain.”

Taleb asserted in their exchanges that genetic evidence of people from sub-Saharan Africa in Roman Britain was lacking. Beard said a major study carried out by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford showed very little sub-Saharan DNA, but also very little Norman DNA, “and there is no doubt that they came here in large numbers”.

There was some criticism of the BBC video on here recently. Where do you stand on this?

One thing that is certain is that the abuse she's receiving is not on, even if you disagree with her. Social media is a cesspit at times.

The Roman empire was ethnically diverse due to how far the empire spread, but they weren't culturally diverse, and that's an important difference. Roman citizens were expected to behave like roman citizens, follow roman laws, and adapt to Roman culture. Existing gods were mapped to Roman ones and you were expected to worship them instead.
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Did the Romans allow transgender legionnaires?
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frozenshock posted...

Did the Romans allow transgender legionnaires?

No, they were concerned with combat effectiveness.
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Romans were more diverse than people think, but the amount of black Africans in it were fairly small (Roman Empire never went that far south) and I doubt any were in Roman Britain.
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what an unfortunate last name

LOL! This whole controversy started on Joseph Paul Watson's twitter.

It is true that the Roman empire, large and bloated as it was during its crux, was not shy to cultures or traditions that the empire could adopt, adapt, and integrate into their own to benefit the kingdom. That included people, too.
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Yeah. I'm not a fan of historical revision in the name of inclusiveness. It's kind of a sticky subject all around. You don't want to exclude, but you don't want to sanitize the past either.

If you're talking about having inclusive casting in a play, that's no big deal -- especially if it's a school play involving impressionable youth. But when people make movies where members of marginalized groups are in positions of authority, or nobody bats an eye at an interracial couple despite the story taking place in a time and location where such pairings were criminalized or subject to hate based violence, that rubs me the wrong way a little.

Take the recent adaptation of The Magnificent Seven. I'm cool with the protagonist being black, but I think five of the seven members of the team should have been black. And I would have had a good deal of dialogue focus on the race of the protagonists and how unusual it was for a white man to be taking orders from a black man.


The hardest thing is that you can't really write down consistent rules for it either as every story is case-specific. Lone Ranger? Sure. Have a white town tip their hat to a black sheriff. Robin Hood? Let Marian fight alongside the men and speak of how she doesn't want to be called "Maid" or "Lady." A medieval story with a dragon? Go ahead and have a white Christian knight in love with a black Muslim knight -- both of which are male.

But when you try to write a story that's realistic, that means carrying the burden of taking a "warts and all" approach. History is ugly. And it's because of that that we have an obligation to document it. The stories of the victims must be documented. And audiences need to see the origins of prejudices which still linger today. It's hard enough to convince people that systemic racism and sexism are real when we're constantly filling people's heads with idyllic interpretations of the past which omit these things so to be inclusive or so as not to offend.

I suppose one black guy might have gone to ancient Britain but it's pretty unlikely. That is a long way from Africa